Guest post: Because governments don’t exist to make a profit

A remark made on one of my posts, last night I think it was, caused me to stop and think about what your average American knows about being a government employee.

To start out, for those who don’t know me or haven’t checked my profile yet, I was a Federal employee for 42 years and 4 months. I served the US Army for four years, and the Food and Drug Administration the rest of the time, starting out as a mail & file clerk and ending up as a senior IT tech overseeing a group of contractors who kept the FDA desktops updated and secure.

Along the way, I worked with scientists, lab people, investigators, inspectors, medical personnel, lawyers, contracting officers, instructors, administrators, and in one capacity or another, others from almost every Center in FDA.

Many of those people had worked in other major Departments, including a supervisor who had once worked for the Justice Department, and a Branch chief whose former intelligence agency employer was so classified, he still was prevented by law from disclosing that to us.

As many of you know from the private sector, each organization, private or public, has its own culture. Much of that culture comes from the top down and is informed by its mission – what it does as a primary function.

But governments, whether local, State or Federal, are different than private companies, large or small.

Why? Because governments don’t exist to make a profit.

Private companies do. That is the very reason they exist! If they cannot make a profit, eventually, they are forced to close and have their assets sold off to satisfy their debts.

Governments don’t go bankrupt. At the worst, they have their credit ratings cut to nothing, forcing them to “live” and operate from cash receipts obtained through statutory incomes, like taxes or receipts from licensing activities, fines, etc.

Their mission is to provide for the safety, welfare, public peace and security of the American people.

That’s a whole lot different from making filthy lucre to fill the bosses’ pockets. That’s why they operate differently, and that’s why Republicans are wrong to try and make the US Government run like a business.

Because it isn’t one.

That’s why the culture of each governmental Department is different, and why each has its own take on transparency.

Yeah, Transparency. Believe me, that’s a tightrope each and every supervisor in the government has to weigh on a regular basis.

Some agencies, by their mission’s demands, cannot be transparent. Intelligence agencies are a good example. We cannot allow foreign governments to know if, when, or how we may or may not be spying on them. We want them to be guessing, constantly, and we want them to guess wrong, every time.

Others, like the military, have inherent activities and equipment that by their nature, need to be secret. Otherwise, their effectiveness in combat is greatly lessened. Enemies who have to guess about what you may bring to the table in a conflict will be cautious and very careful before committing themselves.

Civilian agencies which are by nature enforcing various Federal laws are bound to be secretive in some ways for two reasons: First, they are bound by law to protect proprietary information belonging to the companies they need to inspect as part of that law enforcement activity. Second, they don’t want their enforcement activities to be publicly revealed, because sometimes a surprise inspection is what you need to catch someone who is willfully violating the law. Give them a chance to clean up, and you’ve got nothing for your efforts!

But other agencies have a tougher row to hoe regarding that word transparency. They have to balance letting the public know how they are operating in making policy vs. allowing either political opponents or foreign opponents know secrets that may allow them to counter those policies in ways harmful to the public.

Sometimes, getting that balance right is hard.

One of the things that turned me aside from being a republican early in my government career was their constant ragging on us for being lazy, or corrupt, or leaches sucking at the “government teat”.

I’ve known hundreds if not thousands of people in my career, and with the exception of one or two, not a damn one of them was lazy, or corrupt or anything approaching the description of a leach. They all worked hard for their paychecks. Many of them could have gone outside and gotten much bigger paychecks working for large corporations.

But they stayed, most of them, and they do because they CARE. The mission of the FDA is, among other things similar, to keep your food, your drugs, your cosmetics, your radiation emitting devices, your medical devices, safe, effective and the best American companies can make them to be. Every single FDA employee I’ve worked with cared about that single mission, cared about how their job, whether it was leading a Center, running a computer, or inspecting Mexican produce crossing the border, and how their job impacted the primary mission of the Agency.

I cannot imagine anyone in any other governmental agency feeling any less, whether they are working for the Federal government or a State or local government.

So, folks, when you hear the Republicans continuing to belittle public employees, whether they are US Park Service Rangers, or EPA scientists, or federal Judges, remember this post. Remember that these people CARE – they care about you, me, and their neighbors. They are there, doing their jobs, probably making less money than they could on the outside, because they give a damn about OUR COUNTRY.

They each took an oath, which is very similar to the one Trump just took, to protect and defend the Constitution. Not an oath of loyalty to a President, or to an Agency, or to a boss. To the Constitution of the United States of America.

To serve YOU. That also includes Congress, by the way.

It’s up to you to determine which of those public servants are upholding that oath.

10 Responses to “Guest post: Because governments don’t exist to make a profit”

Great post Robert! Your experience very much matches mine working for a government owned research institute over here. I left several years after it was turned into a government owned company when profit and short term funding cycles became the result. Around that time many many dedicated and wonderful people left, either to retirement or, if they were younger (as I was), into the private sector. After all, of we had to work under private sector imperatives why not at least be paid better and not be frustrated by the destruction of our ability to perform the way we should have been.

I still firmly believe that the most efficient and best value for money output I have ever seen are effectively run organisations in the public sector.

I have also worked for the government most of my life, with stints also in private business, and frankly, I think people automatically assume a private business has to be efficient and effective, while government can get away with sloppy work. This doesn’t fit my experience. Private businesses can be very poorly run, and many of the people, at least at the top, manage to spend time patting themselves on the back, taking themselves out for lunch to celebrate a “good month”, while the people who did the hardest work to make it a “good month” stay behind and plug away at their desks, their cash registers, or their brooms, because they don’t get taken out to lunch, they have to work for the measly dollars they make. There is a lot of rot at the top in private companies.

I also have been in the position, while in government employ, to do a feasibility study on a public-private partnership. We, the government agency, had entered into an agreement with a private group to do a portion of a job for us, a job that entailed a 3 hour drive from our office, an overnight stay for our employees, and a 3 hour drive back to the office. This means the government has to pay a per diem for meals, plus the motel or other lodging for the employee. So we contracted with someone in the area to do that part of the job. The private group never completed the paperwork required to certify their lab met EPA standards; they never collected any of the water samples; they never analyzed any of the samples. So I had to do an evaluation of the cost for us to do it instead, so that we could demonstrate that it was feasible to cancel the contract and do it ourselves. In spite of all the expenses I just mentioned, it turned out that having the private company do it would cost us three times as much as doing it ourselves (why didn’t we do this calculation in advance of the contract, you ask? Reasonable questions. Because the state assumed it would be cheaper to have it done by a private company than to do it ourselves, because this was Oklahoma, and they automatically assumed that private had to be better because, well, government bad). In the end, we cancelled the contract, I travelled out there once a month and collected the water sample, and brought them back to the government run lab in Oklahoma City where we paid a much smaller fee than what we would have paid under the original contract.

Thanks for the comments, I appreciate them, and the opportunity Ophelia gave me by posting this here!

One of the interesting things I learned working at FDA was that we had also done some studies after the big A-76 push by Republicans in the Bush II years was that a contract is ALWAYS more expensive than getting internal employees to do the work. Why?

Because a private company is allowed to add to the costs they bill the government such things as overhead (which is depreciated costs for their own physical plant and its operating costs) and profit. Neither one is considered a cost to the Agency in such studies, because we have our OWN overhead to figure in. A contract forces us to pay not only for ours (to provide space for the contractors to work) but for theirs too! Plus, as an additional consideration, outside workers are almost always paid more than Feds, certainly within the IT field we were working in.

Plus, of course the government doesn’t figure in profit for ourselves.

I recently read Stella Rimington’s autobiography. She was head of MI5 for a period in the 1990s. She talks a lot about the common belief that the private sector is more efficient and points out that the public sector have to co-ordinate lots of departments and decisions taken by one part of the civil service can have unintended consequences for another. That is why the wheels often turn slowly.

After Rimington retired from MI5, she joined the boards of some private companies. She comments that she was surprised how inefficient private companies can be given the frequent claim that they are so much better than the public sector.

Along the same lines, it’s astonishing how many people think teachers have chosen their career primarily because “they get summers off.” And they’re “done at 3 o’clock.” The fact that the summers aren’t exactly unmitigated blissful swaths of free time and the teacher’s day doesn’t end when the bell rings is blithely ignored in favor of the picture which creates more resentment. Someone is getting away with something. They’re not working hard. Lazy.

Dedication, passion, a genuine love of learning, of children, and of helping make the world a better place? The facts of the matter concerning what the job really entails? They get summers off. Case closed.

Sastra, my father always said just that, in spite of the fact that his mother was a teacher her entire life, and she almost certainly didn’t have that sort of blissful, easy life. She worked very hard, but, well, she was off summers, and his farmer father had to work summers (as did she, feeding the farm hands and all the other hard work that went into being the wife of a farmer during the Great Depression).

I think part of that has a lot to do with the fact that teaching is dominated by women. If women can do it, it must be easy, right? When I worked in social work, I heard the same thing about that – oh, that’s an easy job. Huh? Try it, bud. You’ll be singing out of the other side of your mouth very quickly.

Because a private company is allowed to add to the costs they bill the government such things as overhead

Yes, that was a lot of it, of course. But the other thing is, I was the principal investigator on this project, and I was making a salary. The person we were contracting with would be assuming duties that were sort of co-equal with principal investigator, and would be paid a salary (which was twice as large as mine). So you had two people essentially forming the same function, and having to pay them both, plus add on the profit (which was based on a percentage of the overall costs).

I understand completely. In my last position, I oversaw a contractor group as I mentioned in my post. They, too had a supervisor. He also oversaw what they did. Government workers overseeing a contract cannot “supervise” contractors. That would violate the terms of that type of contract. So, yes, I understand completely.

Also, as for teachers getting the “summer off”? That’s kind of like your employer laying you off for three months while they retool the factory. You may be getting that job back in three moths, but you still don’t get a paycheck. Teachers have to get a temp job to fill in this three months. How many employers will save your job, every year, so you can work somewhere else for none months? Not many. And the pay isn’t going to be what your school year job pays.